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FOSSASIA at Google Code-In 2016 Grand Prize Trip

This year FOSSASIA came up with a whopping number of GCI participants, making it to the top. FOSSASIA is a mentor organization at the Google Code-In contest, which introduces pre-university students towards open source development.

Every year Google conducts the grand prize trip to all the GCI winners and I represented FOSSASIA as a mentor.

FOSSASIA GCI winners and Mentor at Google Mountain View Campus.

Day 1:Meet and Greet with the Diverse Communities

We all headed towards the San Francisco Google office and had a great time interacting with members from diverse open source organizations from different parts of the world. I had some interactive conversations with the kids, on how they scheduled their sleep hours in order to complete the task and got feedback from the mentors from different time zones! I was also overwhelmed while listening to their interests apart from open source contributions.

“I am a science enthusiast, mainly interested in Computer Science and its wide range of applications. I also enjoy playing the piano, reading, moving, and having engaging conversations with my friends. As a participant in the GCI contest, I got the chance to learn by doing, I got an insight of how it is like to work on a real open-source project, met some great people, helped others (and received help myself). Shortly, it was amazing, and I’m proud to have been a part of it. ” Shared by one of our Winner Oana Rosca.

There were people from almost 14 different countries, in fact, FOSSASIA, as a team, was the most diverse group 🙂

Day 2: Award Ceremony

We had two winners from FOSSASIA, Arkhan Kaiser from Indonesia and Oana Rosca from Romania. There were 8 organizations with 16 winners. The award ceremony was celebrated on day 2 and each winner was felicitated by Chris DiBona, the director of the Google open source team.

Talks by Googlers

We had amazing speakers from Google who spoke about their work, experiences, and journey to Google. Our first speaker was Jeremy Allison, a notable contributor to “Samba” whichis a free software re-implementation of the SMB/CIFS networking protocol. He spoke on “How the Internet works” and gave a deeper view of the internet magic.

We had various speakers from different domains such as Grant Grundler from the Chrome team, Lyman Missimer from Google Expeditions, Katie Dektar from the Making and Science team, Sean Lip from Oppia(Googler and Oppia org admin), Timothy Papandreou from Waymo and Andrew Selle from TensorFlow.

Day 3: Fun Activities

We had various fun activities organized by the Google team. I had a great time cruising towards the Alcatraz island. Later we had a walk on the Golden Gate bridge. Here comes the fun part of the tour “the cruise dinner” which was the best part of the day.

Day 4: End of the trip

Oana, Arkhan and I gave a nice presentation about our work during GCI. We spoke about all the amazing projects under FOSSASIA. One cool thing we did is that we “Doodled” our presentation 🙂 Here are few images from the actual presentation.

The day ended well with loads of good memories and information. Thanks to the open source technologies and their availability along with a beautiful friendly community, these memories and connections will now remain for a lifetime.